Template Image
Processing Dynamic Event Data and Multifaceted Knowledge in a Collaboration Federation
(This project is funded by NSF grant no. IIS- 0534065)
Project Summary
All nations are facing global problems such as border control and immigration, drug trafficking, terrorism, human disease detection and control, rapid detection of diseases and pests threatening agricultural commodities, and others. The solutions to these complex problems require organizations within a country as well as across national boundaries to effectively and efficiently share, not only heterogeneous data, but also knowledge captured in different knowledge representation schemes and application systems to support their problem-solving and decision-making in highly distributed and dynamic environments.
This project will develop the infrastructure and technologies for the processing and management of 1) distributed events, 2) dynamic data associated with event occurrences, and 3) knowledge expressed by different types of rules and rule structures (multi-faceted knowledge) and application system operations invoked by rules. The R&D results will be applied in the USDA’s National Plant Diagnostics Network (NPDN), a network established for rapid detection of crop disease and pest outbreaks, to enable many collaborating organizations to receive data associated with each occurrence of an event type as well as data generated by different types of rules and rule structures, and application operations triggered by the event to support their local decision-making, problem-solving and activity coordination.
The expected results include 1) an extended rule markup language and user interface tools for defining events and capturing multi-faceted knowledge, 2) techniques for efficient and effective management and processing of distributed, heterogeneous events, event data, triggers and rules, 3) a domain ontology for plant disease diagnostics and techniques for ontology management, and 4) an extended Web Service infrastructure with an ontology-enhanced and constraint-based registry for semantic discovery of triggers, rules and application operations that are uniformly modeled and published as Web Services, and 5) the deployment of the developed tools and system, called Event-Triggered Knowledge Network (ETKnet), at several regional centers of the NPDN for evaluating the R&D results, and applying the developed infrastructure and technologies in the area of plant disease and pest diagnostics, which is a key concern of agricultural homeland security.